In a Heartbeat
by third owl
Summary: This thing he's agreed to isn't real, but if it were, House would still do it. Post-finale, no warnings.


"You aren't really in a position to be making demands, are you?" The man who claims to be an angel seems amused.

"I'll be dead either way, so obviously I can't enforce the contract, but you're asking me to pay a hell of a price. Fair's fair."

"Very well, Doctor House. What is it you want, in addition to our original offer?" The guy - House doesn't know his name and doesn't care - looks unsettlingly like Foreman in his full-on Smug Administrator Mode. He's taller, though, and wears flowing, embroidered silk rather than the tailored Italian kind.

"If you're going to be that much of a bastard to him, and take away his best friend, I want you to give him someone else." This is certainly a dream, but it's an interesting one. He's sitting on the bed, all the details of the room faithfully reproduced, as they almost never are when he's dreaming. He looks over at Wilson, who's asleep and oblivious, thinner today than yesterday. "He needs someone who loves him, and I mean really loves _him_. Not who he pretends to be, or tries to be. Someone he can call as soon as I ... get hit by a truck, or whatever it'll be." House stares steadily at the apparition, the figment who is not there. "You have to replace me."

The man stands there silent for a long moment, then another. He flickers out of existence, then back into it again.

"I have consulted with my superiors," he says. "We can do this, yes. I regret that I can't tell you how your death will occur."

"I don't want to know. What do I have to do, in this fairy tale? Cut my finger and sign my name in blood? The old candle, book and bell routine, maybe? But if that's it, you'll have to B-Y-O-Book. And candle and bell. Not like they keep this stuff at the Hyatt Regency."

"After I leave, lie back down beside your friend, and sleep. What must be done will be done."

The guy who'd said he was an angel disappears, and immediately House is overwhelmed with fatigue. He nestles in beside Wilson, going to sleep inside a dream, wishing it could be real at the same time that he knows, and hopes, it isn't.

Trading his own life for Wilson's - that notion doesn't bother him as much as it probably should. But Wilson should not have to lose him. House is all he has left.

.

* * *

.

"I think you should get checked out," House says. "You've put on, what? Ten pounds in a week? You look ... good." He looks beautiful, in fact, but House has always kind of thought that. It's just easier to admit to himself, now. "If something weird is happening, like you got herpes from your bucket-list threesome and it's made your tumor shrink, you need to know."

"Wishful thinking," Wilson answers, but he's playing pool with House at an hour when, a week ago, he'd have already been passed out in bed.

House remembers the dream, and his skin prickles. This happens a lot, lately.

A short dude, built like a pit bull and sporting a cowboy hat, saunters up beside him. "Care for a third for the next game?" he asks. House is about to tell him three's a crowd, but Wilson's too fast.

"Sure," he says, and introduces himself. The interloper's name is Caton Marshall, some idiot hero right out of a pulp Western novel, and House wants to hate him. Roofing contractor, drinks Budweiser, drawls. Catches a film-noir reference from Wilson and the next thing House knows, he's on the outside edge of a whole laughing conversation.

Two games later, they've arranged to meet back there the next night, and do it again.

House briefly wonders if this could be his replacement, because he is a moron. There is no replacement. It was just a dream, House is still living and Wilson still dying. He looks better right now, but bodies are always making promises they don't keep. A few more months, and it'll be House who'll have to find another friend.

.

* * *

.

There is a sense in which he's glad Marshall - he can't call the guy Caton, because seriously, _Caton?_- has become a fixture. On those nights when House gets edgy, wanting to know why Wilson has more energy than he did a few days ago, why he's not taking pain pills anymore, what that look was and when the hell will they finally leave PoDunk for greener pastures? Those nights, they don't fight because Wilson goes to hang out with what is rapidly becoming BFF Number Two.

Or they go play cards with the guy, and thus avoid any conversation that might start with _We need to discuss this_, which isn't something Wilson says much anyhow. House just wants to make sure it stays that way.

About three weeks since the three of them met, they end up on Marshall's back deck, grilling New York strip steaks, drinking wine because Marshall and Wilson both like it, and being nosed by Marshall's big black Lab. There's no Budweiser in the fridge at this place, just a couple microbrews House has never heard of. He takes one, but it isn't nearly as much alcohol as he wants.

He can't seem to stop himself spreading his discomfort; he springs the question as Marshall is taking the steaks off the barbecue. "So. When exactly did you figure out you were gay?"

Wilson looks mortified, but Marshall only stops moving for a second before looking up at House. "Couldn't say there was a particular moment," he answers. "Was there one for you?"

"Touché," says House. It's all he can come up with. "Need anything from the kitchen?"

Dinner is excellent, but the next time House is invited, he doesn't go. Hanging out with Wilson and Marshall feels like being a stick jammed through the spokes of a bicycle wheel. It's nobody's fault it doesn't work.

.

* * *

.

Two months after the angelic visit that didn't happen, and he's standing beside Wilson, the two of them squinting and scowling at films that cannot possibly be real. House feels his skin flush and then go cold. That prickling feeling returns, spreading over his arms, down his back and his legs.

"You ... don't seem happy," Wilson says, when he stops gawping long enough to notice. "House?"

"It's a dream come true," House answers. "I'm just in shock. Let's go celebrate."

They leave the clinic, giddy and dazed.

.

* * *

.

"I do love you, you know." They're coming back from dinner, Wilson a little buzzed and House not, which is why he's driving, and he's wondering why he's saying it now, like some kind of last confession. "Pretty much always have."

"I know." Wilson smiles at him, a little loopy. "Wanted you to say it 'cause I can't. And it's true."

"You're such a sap." If there really was some cosmic trade-off, House thinks, it would have happened by now. Wilson's got his unexplained remission and his groovy, lonely, film-noir-watching cowboy. Dude hadn't even freaked out when he'd learned his new buddy wasn't long for this world.

It dawns upon House while they're waiting at a stoplight, a few blocks away from their latest temporary home: Wilson hasn't called Marshall today. In the ... six or seven hours since he got the proof the tumors had vanished, he hasn't called _anyone_.

.

* * *

.

They're just in the door of their place when it happens. The thing that feels like a mule kick straight to the chest.

"Wilson," he says. It's all he can manage while his knees are buckling for what he knows will be the very last time. His hand clutches his jacket, over the heart that is ready to stop.

The last thing he hears is Wilson dialing 911; the last things he feels are Wilson's hands, the first chest compression.

.

* * *

.

"You were steadfast," says the man who isn't an angel, who has to be some kind of subconscious manifestation of whatever the hell is manifesting here. "We were surprised, after his healing, that you remained willing to honor the agreement. You didn't want to die."

They are standing in a hospital room in a hospital House doesn't recognize, but he does know the pathetic specimen in the bed. Intubated, an IV, a catheter; how much time has passed? he wonders. The heart monitor is steady. Wilson, asleep and haggard in the world's least comfortable chair, looks almost more dead than the patient.

"Thought you were going to kill me," House says, "not turn me into a rutabaga."

"You did die. The bargain was fulfilled, and we ... replaced you. You failed to consider that the word has more than one meaning."

_Oh_, House thinks. "Replaced. In the sense of putting something back where it was."

"We had no choice; there was a ... complication."

"He's better, I died, and his buddy Marshall adores him. No wonder the world's a wreck, if your boss thinks _this_is complicated."

The angel, the hallucination who makes him outright miss Amber, only smiles. "Had you asked for any other thing, it would have been simple. Riches until your death, or fame after it, or some last pleasures for yourself. These are the things men want. But you bargained for someone to love that man, as he is." The divine bureaucrat holds up one huge hand, staving off House's protest. "It could not be done. There is no one else he allows to see him."

The words wend their way into House's brain, and his anger rises to meet them. "If that means I wake up and he dies of cancer all over again, you can shove that deal up your heavenly ass. He _lives_. That was the bargain."

The angel throws his head back and laughs, a laugh that shakes the walls and rumbles through House's chest as the room goes black and then bright again, and he wakes up, choking on the tube down his throat.

Wilson is up, hovering, hitting the call button as the last booming echoes fade away.

.

* * *

.

He's been over and over his own charts, courtesy of Wilson - sly, charming, affable Wilson - getting him every available scrap of information. They've tested and re-tested, MRIed and CTed and even X-rayed the hell out of him, and House is no closer to a rational answer. All he is, is bored.

There weren't any blockages to explain the cardiac arrest, no clots or swellings or anything that should have caused him to drop dead, or to be comatose for two days after heavy-duty voltage jerked him back to life. There's no arrhythmia. There's no nothing, anywhere; there's just him in this room with Wilson and the stupid basic cable package and not an answer in sight that doesn't involve stuff that cannot have happened.

They're waiting on the paperwork for House ("Robert Bell") to sign himself out against medical advice. _The Price is Right_ ends and home shopping begins; House flips the channel. _Gunsmoke_. Flip. Soap opera House doesn't watch. His head hurts. Flip. An infomercial for exercise equipment consisting of giant rubber bands and kettleballs.

_"Just twice a day for thirty minutes!"_the guy says.

"You don't have to stay here," House says. He doesn't look around.

"I know," Wilson says mildly.

"Take some time off. Go get lunch with Caton," House says, and there, he's said it even though it makes his chest hurt in addition to his head.

Wilson eases back in his chair and watches the TV. "Nope," he says, and he's got that look in his eye that tells House it's the end of this conversation.

_"Abs of steel!"_the guy says. Flip. Televised Bible study; sometimes good for a laugh.

_"No greater love has any man than this_," the woman reads. She looks like his maternal grandmother, same glasses and hair and all. _"No greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend."_

"How true," Wilson says, looking at House with a kind of fond accusation. He means the faked death, of course. Not the real one, because he has no idea, because it didn't happen.

"Don't be an idiot," House snaps at him, and he turns the thing off.

~end~


End file.
